The Last of the Savages (20 page)

“That’s really …
kind
of you to say that,” I said, ringing a slight variation on the adjective.

At that moment Lollie tugged on my sleeve. “Hey, sweetface. You ready to blow?”

“I think maybe I should stick around awhile,” I said.

“What are you, a necrophiliac? These people are stifter than Elbridge.”

I put a censorious finger to my lips. “I really think I ought to stay.”

“Suit yourself, Aeneas. I’m heading for the surface.” I watched her leave with the sinking feeling that I was making a mistake. Anything might happen if I joined her now. I might even lose my virginity. At the very least I’d have a ride and a familiar companion. I was throwing this away, for what? I told myself I’d come all this way for Elbridge’s funeral and it behooved me to spend time here, with his family, though in fact I found myself riveted by the presence of Cheryl and entertaining a ridiculous notion of impressing myself upon her. Just then she was speaking to an elderly couple. They all seemed to be crying.

I went to the bar and got a bourbon from Joseph. Cordell introduced me to the relatives, boycotting Will’s name—I was “a friend of the family.”

By the time I escaped an uncle with an obsessive interest in gardening, I couldn’t see Cheryl anywhere. After getting another drink, I found myself holding a defensive position against the fireplace, pinned down by heavy artillery: a pimpled soldier was discoursing on the Southern Military Tradition. Stonewall Jackson holding the line at Manassas … Jeb Stuart riding again, dashing across the Chickahominy on his roan mare in plumed hat and silk cape, mocking the ponderous Yankee behind his own lines … A wounded Bedford Forrest at Shiloh, musket ball lodged against his spine, scooping up a hostage under his arm as he gallops off to fight another day … All the
beaux sabreurs
of the South.

“It’s in the blood,” he insisted. “From that day to this—the military man is respected and honored in Dixie. I’ll tell you what—we don’t have no damn peaceniks down here dishonoring the flag and burning their damn brassieres.” Though his arm was draped fraternally around my shoulder, his tone was becoming increasingly strident, his face dangerously red, the slits of his eyes narrower. Afraid I might at any moment be accused of brassiere burning or worse, I claimed to need the bathroom and retreated to the back of the house.

Hearing a feminine sob from one of the guest rooms, I nudged the door, which was slightly ajar, and found Cheryl lying on her back on the
bed, feet on the floor. Mascara had run down her cheek, and her hair was in disarray, but she was no less beautiful for that. She lifted her head and smiled wanly. “It’s you.”

I walked over and stood beside her. “Will you hold me,” she asked. “I want you to hold me.” Unable to believe my ears, I sat down gingerly on the bed beside her. She opened her arms. Slowly, incredulously, I lowered myself slowly into her embrace. All at once she was kissing me wildly, probing my mouth with a furious tongue. I knew she was drunk, and I knew that this had everything to do with a boy lying in a coffin a few miles away and nothing to do with me, but I didn’t pause to worry about that. Suddenly she took my hand and thrust it into her blouse, under her bra and into possession of the miraculous swelling of her breast. Even as I tried to abandon myself to the moment I felt almost frightened by her morbid intensity. I have never been kissed, before or since, with such swallowing greed. It was as if she were trying to perform resuscitation, bring me, or someone else, back from the dead. I rolled on my side to help her rip the clinging blouse away from her flesh.

Something caught my eye: Mrs. Savage was standing in the doorway. I froze as Cheryl continued to struggle with her shirt. If I’ve ever been more mortified I can’t remember. “I think that’s quite enough,” Mrs. Savage commanded.

Cheryl turned slowly, mechanically, toward her ex-mother-in-law-to-be. I sat up on the bed.

“I believe it’s time for you to be leaving, Patrick,” Elbridge’s mother said, her face an impassive mask.

Cheryl appeared to be in a daze, slack-mouthed and glassy-eyed, Sleeping Beauty arising from her coma. I took her hand. “Will you be okay,” I asked.

“That’s none of your concern,” said the mask.

I staggered down the hallway and let myself out the sliding door in back, emerging into a dark garden spangled with fireflies. The setters in their kennels began to bark, scenting my fugitive anxiety. Out on the road I tried to hitch a ride. Sometime after midnight a guy in a pickup truck brought me to a gas station where I called a cab.

“What the
heck?
” exclaimed the cabbie, as we rattled through the fields past the invisible horses: although it was only a little past midnight, dawn appeared to be glowing over the ridge to the east. A few minutes later we saw the flames, stark and beautiful against the blackness of the surrounding countryside. Will’s castle was burning, throwing flames a hundred feet into the sky. The cab pulled to a stop beside Taleesha, who was standing in the driveway a hundred yards from the conflagration. The cabbie and I stood beside her and stared at the flames. Finally she said, “They waited until we were just about finished.”

“What happened,” I asked.

“What do
you
think?” she said impatiently. “Loose wire, maybe? Is that a
plausible
explanation?”

The fire engines arrived a few minutes later, almost an hour after Taleesha had called. No one was surprised when the police investigators concluded that arson was involved, nor was anyone particularly amazed that no suspects were ever apprehended.

T
he summer that men walked on the moon, Edward Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and I drudged for my father in his store, selling washers and dryers, yearning to be a young oligarch—a loafered lizard sunning on a rock in Bar Harbor … guzzling south-siders in Southampton.

Taleesha sent a postcard from India. “Hot, dusty and dirty—just like home. Will is collecting weird antiques and auditioning holy men. He says to tell you don’t be fooled—the moon landing was staged in a TV studio in the Nevada desert to distract people from the real problems. Jes’ thought you’d like to know.” She concluded by inviting me to meet them in August for a big music festival in upstate New York, but for reasons I can’t remember now I didn’t attend what was later regarded as the seminal event of my generation.

To alleviate my boredom that summer, I interviewed Nana Keane, who told me among other facts that two of my immigrant forebears, newly escaped from the famine, arrived here just in time to help fight the Civil War. Her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, was wounded at Gettysburg. A blacksmith, he had lived with a gangrenous leg wound which his wife washed and dressed every day for twenty-six years. His
brother had died somewhat more rapidly from a bayonet wound suffered in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee.

Back at school again, I hunkered down in the stacks, shuttling up and down High Street between Branford College and Sterling Library, the carillons of Harkness Tower providing the only music in my life. For economy’s sake, I had decided shortly before entering to complete Yale in three years, which required an academic load of six courses each semester. All of Yale’s secret societies somehow failed to tap me for membership, and in response I threw myself into academic life with a vengeance. For a variety of reasons, I declared history my major. My excursions into the South had reawakened a childhood interest in the Civil War. Then, too, I felt I’d been born too late, imagining myself not as a serf, but as a kind of Jeffersonian gentleman with a book in one hand and a riding crop in the other. But even I was beginning to suspect that the old order to which I wanted to pledge allegiance was crumbling. When I spoke to Will I advocated my choice of majors in contemporary terms: the study of the past, I told him, would illuminate the present struggle. And not least, I hoped it would help me get into Harvard Law.

I didn’t see Will for six months after his house burned to the ground. Ravaged and reticent, he’d come back to the ashes after a fierce, week-long bender in the Delta, crawling the juke joints. He would call me often enough that fall—seldom before midnight—that I think of him as nearly present that year, living in the hall phone booth with its locker-room/ashtray smell, its carved initials and graffiti:
WHEN BETTER WOMEN ARE MADE YALE MEN WILL MAKE THEM
, and late in the following year—
WHEN BETTER MEN ARE MADE, YALE WOMEN WILL HAVE EQUALS
. After the fire, he and Taleesha had moved into a suite at the Peabody Hotel. I wrote him letters, carbons of which I haphazardly saved along with English and history papers, like this representatively embarrassing note:

What seems interesting to me about this now is the way I was straining to find the bridge between Will’s world and my own. Or perhaps I was cooler than I remember; I haven’t thought of Norman O. Brown in years, but the fact that I read him then would seem to indicate that I was less of a nerd than I remember. In retrospect, maybe I’ve made the oppositions more stark, given where we both ended up. Besides this I notice the uneasy tension between self-mockery and showing off; clearly I was very pleased to deploy the word
Weltanschauung
, with its Panzer division of vowels—in fact the whole sentence seems to exist for the purpose of using it.

Will was present also that year in the form of his great-greatgrandfather John Savage, who as a boy featured prominently in the
diaries of Binnie Pilcher Savage and whom I could only envision in Will’s precise image. The diaries rambled innocuously enough except for their news of the distant war, until this entry from the spring of 1861:

Within weeks of this event, according to the diaries, Clarence and seven other slaves at Bear Track and two adjoining plantations were hanged. The subject of slave rebellions was an increasingly fashionable one toward the end of the sixties, and it occurred to me that this remarkable slice of history which had fallen into my hands would make a fine subject for a thesis. I began to spend most of my time in the stacks, poring through slave narratives and old WPA interviews with former slaves. Will promised he would try to find more material, though the Savage archives, I suspected, were closed to him for the indefinite future.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, almost two months into my search, I found what I was looking for on a Library of Congress microfilm—a short interview with a slave named Prince Johnson who had grown up at Bear Track plantation, the first independent confirmation of Binnie Savage’s story of the alleged slave insurrection: